FURTHER SIGNS OF BIG FIVE COLLAPSE
Why are New York lit-media’s glamor couple, Keith Gessen and Emily Gould– Scott and Zelda without the charisma or talent– always whining?
First we saw Emily Gould in an essay early last year complaining how she spent a $200,000 book advance on a $1,700-a-month Brooklyn apartment and cat expenses.
http://www.metafilter.com/136982/How-much-my-novel-cost-me-by-Emily-Gould
An inadvertently hilarious tale of arguments with Mom; the health problems of her cat, Ruffles; envy of Lena Dunham; crying at high-priced Broadway plays; and the like. Woe is me!
THIS is the essay which caused lit critic Ed Champion to blow up his mind and career last summer in an 11,000-word rant which called Gould a literary narcissist; prelude to the first of Ed’s two nervous breakdowns.
Or maybe it was Emily Gould’s essay collection, And the Heart Says Whatever.
Whatever.
Now we have Keith Gessen adding to the Insider whine with an essay in the newest issue of his literary journal, n+1. The essay is titled “Brief History of a Small Office.” It chronicles the amazing fact that an intellectual journal written in dense prose and containing a ton of academic jargon per page isn’t swimming in bucks. The attitude is akin to Emily Gould’s: We’re special. Somebody pay for us! (Realities of the market are unacknowledged, because n+1‘s editors are, er, “Marxists.”)
Meanwhile, in just the past few months n+1 magazine has received splashy write-ups in both the New York Times and Washington Post. Merely one of n+1‘s staff of well-bred and well-connected editors, Keith Gessen regularly writes for America’s best-paying magazines. In just the past year, for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and New York magazine, among other outlets. Things couldn’t conceivably be better for these folks.
Keith Gessen and Company are apologists for Big Five publishing as well as recipients of its largesse. Yet it’s not enough! Maybe things aren’t quite as cushy in the posh New York literary world as we’ve been told.
-KW